Friday, August 9, 2013

Feedback on a script

I sent a feature script to Blue Cat Screenplay Competition and received the feedback after the set out time. It was valuable feedback, and from two different readers, which is even better.

I sent this script because of all my features I have, just one that is contemporary, and of all the others, this was the one I thought might be possible to do without a huge budget: Sunlight.

The readers were anonymous, but it would be interesting to know if my impression is right; I think one of the reader is a man and the other a woman. Does it matter? No, not much, really. I don't do a script for men or women. But never the less, it would be fascinating if a woman got that impression of the male characters as described of one of the readers.

One of the readers stated this:"Quite frankly, the screenplay seems to be rather misandristic. The men are all would-be rapists except for the one with cerebral palsy and the impotent one, and even they seem like they’d do it if they could until they come under the tutelage of the (lesbian!) enlightened woman. Not that it’s unbelievable that there would be rapists among the forters, or that Hannah would be considered a prize to be had, but still. Many of the descriptions tend to point out the prevalence of male hormones and the like. It could stand to be toned down. Focus on the actions of the characters, not their sex."

I realize that I have created a world with a very important background story that does not come through as it should. There is a reason for things to be as they are, but I never tell. My mistake, absolutely.

So, how to reveal this background without telling instead of showing? My heart sank as a stone. Since I realized that my fantasy scripts would never reach any form of audience before I turned them into novels, I've also come to embrace the format of "normal written text" where a background story could be slipped in without much fuss at all. At the same time I felt if my over ten years of writing movie scripts couldn't result in a script with an important background incorporated, I should never write any more movie scripts. If I don't try to rewrite this, I will feel like I've given up that part of my career. And that was not the point of writing novels.